DYNAMIC MODALS – ENGLISH AND SERBIAN CONTRASTED

Abstract

The current study attempts to investigate the semantic domain of dynamic modality in English and Serbian by focusing on the dynamic modals in English and their translation equivalents in Serbian. It tends to fill the existing research gap regarding a comprehensive contrastive analysis tackling all dynamic modality subtypes in the investigated languages. Cross-linguistically, modality is expressed by different grammatical categories with a tendency for typologically related languages to convey modal meanings by similar devices. We expect the analysis to show that both English and Serbian have grammatical devices to express dynamic modal meanings and that dynamic modality is expressed in similar ways in the two languages. Two complementary objectives underlie the analysis: to identify and provide an account of the devices used to express dynamic modality in English and Serbian and to compare and contrast the two languages. The unilateral contrastive analysis, guided by the principles set in Đorđevic (1994), used a semantically based tertium comparationis, i.e. the principle of translation equivalence seen in terms of semantic equivalence. The analysis was carried out on the corpus compiled for these purposes comprising the excerpted examples from two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro (Ishiguro 2005, 2016) and their published Serbian translations (Isiguro 2003; Ишигуро 2009).